On Thursday September 9, 2010, Gravel and Gage will host a central press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, presenting hard evidence that all three WTC skyscrapers on September 11, 2001, in NYC were destroyed by explosive controlled demolition.

Senator Gravel notes, "Critically important evidence has come forward after the original government building reports were completed."

This press conference will be webcast at AE911Truth.org and hosted concurrently in cities throughout the world.*= Following the conference, there will be a mock debate during which public statements made by government investigators and other defenders of the official account will be presented and responded to in multimedia format. "They refuse to debate us in person," says Gage, "so we will let their public statements represent them."

They won't debate you in person because, in the words of the immortal Barney Frank, it's like talking to a dining room table.

According to their website, they have 1,277 signatures of "verified" architects and enginees on a petition calling for a Congressional investigation into the collapse, including a full inquiry into the possiblitity that explosives were used.

That is a far cry from "1,270 Architects/Engineers Reveal Hard Evidence of Explosive Demolition".

According to their website, they have 1,277 signatures of "verified" architects and enginees on a petition calling for a Congressional investigation into the collapse, including a full inquiry into the possiblitity that explosives were used.

Pretty much all of those architects & engineers are people who design 2 story houses or small mechanical tool. Meaning that they read some BS on the net & latched onto it while they have impressive sounding credentials (they are licensed architects & engineers) but know almost nothing about the engineering of skyscrapers.

According to their website, they have 1,277 signatures of "verified" architects and enginees on a petition calling for a Congressional investigation into the collapse, including a full inquiry into the possiblitity that explosives were used.

That is a far cry from "1,270 Architects/Engineers Reveal Hard Evidence of Explosive Demolition".

How many people on that list do you suppose are actually engineers or architects who do, in fact, support the petition?

My experience with such lists (like the 1000 scientists who don't believe in evolution or the 30,000 who don't believe in global warming) causes me to guess that the actual number is probably closer to 300 or so.

crocoduck_hunter - I wonder how many of them are "scientists" in the sense that they are certified to teach elementary school or middle school science. I'm not trying to bag on teachers or anything but my experience is that often science teachers in the lower grades didn't even major in science. The majored in english or early childhood education. The fact that most people who are serious about science don't want to teach young kids often means that middle schools in particular have to fill their science departments with teachers who studied english or math & just minored in science; which usually means that they had to take like 4 classes in science over their college career.

I'm sorry if I offended any teachers but I had an 8th grade science teacher (who had majored in English) who didn't understand the difference between a galaxy and a solar system. I was 14 years old and knew better just from having read Arthur C. Clarke & watched Star Trek.

crocoduck_hunter - I wonder how many of them are "scientists" in the sense that they are certified to teach elementary school or middle school science. I'm not trying to bag on teachers or anything but my experience is that often science teachers in the lower grades didn't even major in science. The majored in english or early childhood education. The fact that most people who are serious about science don't want to teach young kids often means that middle schools in particular have to fill their science departments with teachers who studied english or math & just minored in science; which usually means that they had to take like 4 classes in science over their college career.

I'm sorry if I offended any teachers but I had an 8th grade science teacher (who had majored in English) who didn't understand the difference between a galaxy and a solar system. I was 14 years old and knew better just from having read Arthur C. Clarke & watched Star Trek.

From time spent on Panda's Thumb, Why Evolution Is True, and the National Center for Science Education websites, it seems like this is a common complaint among biologists- many science teachers in the US don't know anything about evolution and do a poor job teaching it (if they teach it at all- in strongly religious sections of the country it's apparently commonplace to either skip origins altogether or to blatantly teach biblical creationism as fact).

But the lists like the one in the OP or the two I mentioned (the one in my sig line was done by the NCSE as both a Take That! at the Discovery Institute and as a posthumous tribute to Steven J Gould) are frequently padded with a lot of people who aren't scientists (or architects) at all.

So was it just an amazing coincidence that the planes hit the buildings at the same time as the explosion?

On occasion I've remarked that the intellectual standards have dropped so low that these days people can't even be "wrong" right anymore, and this is exactly what I'm talking about.

There's a line in the original Terminator where Dr. Silberman is describing Kyle Reese's tale of a robot from the future, who looks perfectly human and is isn't carrying any futuristic weaponry because of how the time travel machines works, as the "perfect delusion" because it is completely self contained and requires, nor indeed accepts, any outside evidence.

Conspricy theories used to be a little rational. Not in their evidence, but at least in the mental picture they painted. Someone wants Kennedy dead so they put one patsy in a office tower to take a few popshots at the President as he's riding in Dallas, a sharpshooter on the Grassy Knoll to actually make the kill shot, publicly announce the patsy, and then kill him, and finally pin it all on him. It wasn't true, it wasn't supported by any of the known evidence... but at least it formed a logically congruent package.

But modern conspiracy theories don't even have to make sense internally.

That's the problem with the Truther movement. It's not just the horrible moral implications of what they are arguing or the fact that there is no intellectual basis or evidence for their crazy idea. It's the fact that it doesn't make any sense even if you operate under the assumption that it's true. It doesn't make sense even if you believe it.

Even as a thought experiment the Truther version of the events of 9/11 just doesn't work. It raises more questions then it does answers.

Even ignoring the facts that are counter to their version of events (you know like oh I don't know... all of them.) the very logical flow of the concepts just doesn't work. Even if I accept that Bush & Co wanted to stage an attack on America and put aside all the evidence that isn't true and operate under the assumption that is the case, the story still doesn't make sense. Do these idiots have any idea how long it would take to set enough explosives to topple a building like the WTC towers? When were these explosives planted and how did none of the thousands of people who work in the towers notice? And why even bother flying planes into them? Why not just say terrorist planted the explosions? Why did they pick such an expensive and convoluted method? Why plant explosives in building and hit them with planes? Why actually fly planes into the WTC but fake the one hitting the Pentagon? Where does the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania fit into this?

You know what, here is the sad fact. The Truther Movement isn't a conspiracy theory. It doesn't make enough sense to be a conspiracy theory. No we need a new word for the level of stupid put forth in it, because the Truther Movement is to conspiracy theories what conspiracy theories are to normal thought.

Even as a thought experiment the Truther version of the events of 9/11 just doesn't work. It raises more questions then it does answers.

I think that is their point and the point of people who argue these theories - they want to ask questions irregardless of their relevance, to inject doubt because all they can do is create a false equivalence. To them, asking questions must mean that there is a good answer - otherwise there would be no reason to ask those questions in the first place.

It doesn't matter that the logic falls flat - they don't get that far and they don't care to. Anything that doesn't prescribe to their biases and answers is part of the conspiracy and cannot be known.

You know what, here is the sad fact. The Truther Movement isn't a conspiracy theory. It doesn't make enough sense to be a conspiracy theory. No we need a new word for the level of stupid put forth in it, because the Truther Movement is to conspiracy theories what conspiracy theories are to normal thought.

I see a lot of these conspiracy theory people as people desperate- on some level- to be well-known and respected and in the In-Crowd, and believing in conspiracies lets them feel important and better than ignorant you.

I wouldn't say that the 9/11 Truther movement is necessarily any less logically consistent (in that you can't get less consistent than "it's not") than the people who think that the Holocaust was hoaxed. I think that looking at one conspiracy theory, comparing it to one other in the past, and then deciding that conspiracy theories are getting less X is a bit of a fallacious argument in and of itself. Me, I'd prefer to continue talking about how bat-s crazy the Truther movement is.

As for why people believe in conspiracy theories, I think it might have something to do with why the ancient Greeks for example believed in capricious and mean gods. Having people pulling strings and making bad things happen on purpose is pretty bad but I think for some people it's better than the idea that things sometimes happen at random, or in the case of 9/11 we just didn't have the tools then to prevent a small conspiracy of radicals from flying planes into buildings, in part because nobody had ever hijacked planes to fly them into buildings before.

I believe this is the same group that had a booth at last year's Architecture Exchange in Richmond (it's a 3-day convention where architects can get continuing education credits; product reps and vendors set up booths on the main floor). I remember their booth was always empty; no one really paid any attention to them.